1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to sensors and control systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to providing interactivity with sensors and control systems.
2. Background Art
People seek out entertainment at a wide variety of different experiential venues. For example, some people take pleasure in watching a movie in a movie theater, other people enjoy walking through a museum, while still other people attend theme parks to go on theme park rides. These experiential venues all share the characteristic of being well suited for entertaining large groups of people. Movie theaters can seat groups of hundreds of people every several hours, museums can accommodate thousands of people each day, and theme parks can handle tens of thousands of people each weekend. While entertaining large numbers of people is a laudable achievement, conventional entertainment techniques utilized in these experiential venues provide very little interactivity or personalization.
The lack of interactivity or personalization leads to dissimilar personal experiences among experiential venue guests. For example, guests at a movie theater who each see the same movie may have different levels of enjoyment because of their varying tastes. Guests walking through a particular circuit of an art museum each experience the exhibits in a similar order and from a similar perspective, when they might instead enjoy the artwork more in different orders and from different perspectives. Guests on a theme park ride may experience fear or boredom according to their relative sensitivities, but must all take the same ride. In each example, the experiential venue fails to interact with or provide personalization for its guests, and thus some guests' personal experiences are poorer than they could have otherwise been.
Several solutions to this failure of interactivity or personalization have been advanced. Such solutions often begin by acquiring guest feedback. For example, one solution equips theme park ride cars with buttons or joystick controls so that guests can control a ride factor, such as which path a ride takes among several alternative paths. This solution has several drawbacks. For instance, such controls are obtrusive, and require the guest to be distracted from the experience of the ride in order to operate the controls. Another disadvantage of using such controls that measure intentional inputs from the guest is that the guest has an opportunity to misrepresent his own feelings or make an error, thereby reducing the satisfaction he receives from the ride.
Accordingly, there is a need to overcome the drawbacks and deficiencies in the art by offering an improved method or system for providing the guests with interactive and personalized entertainment experiences.